All Souls by Michael Patrick MacDonald A Family Story from Southie

...his hard-won conception of how ghettoized poverty spawns localized violence, and the dignity he brings to lives snuffed out in chaos, gives All Souls a moral urgency usually lacking in current memoir or crime prose. A remarkable work.
-Kirkus

A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald's Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters like his Ma, a miniskirted, accordion-playing single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty.

Michael Patrick MacDonald helped launch Bostons successful gun-buyback program and is founder of the South Boston Vigil Group. He has won the American Book Award, a New England Literary Lights Award, and the Myers Center Outstanding Book Award administered by the Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. His second book, the highly acclaimed memoir Easter Rising, was published in 2006, and will be available in paperback from Houghton Mifflin in March, 2008. He is currently writing the screenplay of All Souls for director Ron Shelton. MacDonald lives in Brooklyn.

Critic reviews for All Souls
All: 5 | Positive: 5 | Negative: 0

Kirkus

...his hard-won conception of how ghettoized poverty spawns localized violence, and the dignity he brings to lives snuffed out in chaos, gives All Souls a moral urgency usually lacking in current memoir or crime prose. A remarkable work.

Publishers Weekly

In this plainly written, powerful memoir, MacDonald...details not only his own story of growing up in Southie...but examines the myriad ways in which the media and law enforcement agencies exploit marginalized working-class communities.

Infoshop News

on
Jun 03 2002

..."All Souls" is well worth reading. It’s unique because it gives a non-stereotypical view from an insider rather than an ivory tower academic looking in, interpreting with liberal or conservative theories.